The Kinks are a bunch of dorks. This album proves it.
That's not just me talking. The aforementioned Rock Snob's Dictionary sums this album -- supposedly a "lost masterpiece" among Rock Snobs (whoever the hell they are) -- as "pastoral Victorian whimsy" released a year too late to cash in on it.
Yet it remains beloved of critics and nerds, who love nothing so much as trying to convince people that excessively wrought glockenspiel solos are the greatest thing since Elvis wandered into the Memphis Recording Service.
Now, I haven't a thing against glockenspiel solos, or expressions of pastoral Victorian whimsy. So I don't mind The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. In fact, I'll admit that some of these songs have a wonderful knack for infecting your brain. "Picture Book" probably wrote the bible on what it means for a song to be "jangly", but it's got a nice shuffle to it. "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains,"
a rather kitschy blues, is better for the solo, which bursts out of the melody into something resembling a rock song. "Wicked Annabella" also satisfies the craving for rock, but it seems odd and out of place, a desperate reminder of what the Kinks were doing a few years previously. And I'm almost prepared to forgive "Johnny Thunder" for the opening line "lives on water, feeds on lightning."
But there's plenty on here that's simply irritating. "Monica" sounds like the Ventures rewritten as Muzak." "People take Pictures" is a tedious diptych of "Picture Book" that undermines the first song. And the requisite Floydish hippy silliness appears, apropos of nothing, on "Phenomenal Cat."
As a microcosm of what's wrong with this record, I choose "Big Sky," a rather dopey expression of 60's Romanticism, without any of the threat or sense of taboo violation that makes Romanticisim interesting. Dave Davies' guitar, which livened up "Steam Powered Trains" so nicely, gets buried underneath orchestral arrangements. In fairness, the stuffing also does much to obscure the rather banal lyrics about "big city lies." But not enough.
It takes some careful pop melodicism to make this kind of Little-England bigotry sound transgressive, and Ray Davies certainly brings that. But I'm afraid, like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, this album gets by more on it's minted status as a flower-power curio than repeated listenings.
Then again, it does have oompahs.
Grade: OK
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